Amy Hennig, whose portfolio boasts titles such as Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Jak and Daxter and the Uncharted series has said that SP games are getting increasingly difficult to fund for third-party studios.
Amy Hennig was recently at Gamelab with Mark Cerny to discuss video games and they were interviewed by the host Geoff Keighley. The interview was posted with the full transcript on Venture Beat.
After the interview, Amy Hennig was asked by the audience to comment on the death of single player games and she gave this lengthy answer to this question
“It’s not that we’re looking at the death of single-player games, or that players don’t want that. Some publishers are going to fall on one end of that spectrum or another based on their business plan. Fair enough. It’s just that the traditional ways we’ve done that are getting harder and harder to support. That’s why I’ve talked in the past about feeling like we’re in an inflection point in the industry. We’ve talked about this for a long time. How do we keep on making games like this when they’re getting prohibitively expensive? We don’t want to break the single-player experience, but there’s pressure to provide more and more at the same price point games have always been.
That isn’t sustainable, I believe. I think it breaks the purpose of a single-player game. I was saying to some people here, I play games because I want to finish them. I want to see the story. I like the arc of a story. I don’t see the ends of most games. How crazy is it that we say it’s about narrative, but we make games where a fraction of the audience sees the end of the game? That’s heartbreaking. I hope that we see more shakeup in the industry. We’ll open up the portfolios — maybe with a subscription model — so we can see that there can be story games that are four hours long at an appropriate price point. We have digital distribution. That should be possible. We shouldn’t be stuck at this brick and mortar price point and trying to make more and more content, breaking the spirit of these games.”
Amy might be speaking from her own experience working at EA on the cancelled open-world Star Wars game. The single player focused game was rumored to be cancelled because it didn’t fit with EA’s business policies, especially microtransactions and games as a service.
Credits: Gearnuke, VentureBeat